How do you approach an idea? Source Blog Notions - September 8,2011

Posted by Jeff Hajek, July 31, 2011 There are two basic types of people. Those who are worried about trying an idea that won’t work, and those that are worried about not trying an idea that might work. The first type can go a whole career with some degree of success. Every time I play golf, I realize that at my skill level, a successful game is far more about avoiding errors than it is about making great shots. When I hit a great drive down the middle of the fairway, it rarely translates into a birdie (one better than par). But when I hit a shot into the water, or lose one in the woods, or misread a green, the extra shots pile on in a hurry. I find that being risk averse results in better scores for me. But in real life off the golf course, I am more worried about missing opportunities than I am about making mistakes. There is a lot of competition in the improvement consulting world. Simply avoiding mistakes is not enough to be successful. You end up being left behind by others with more interesting, effective training tools and more innovative ideas. You have to take chances and try new things to keep your rivals from pulling ahead of you. If you are familiar with sampling or hypothesis testing, you will recognize what I am talking about: error types. You might know them as Type-I and Type-II, or alpha and beta errors. One is the “false positive”, in which something is thought to be true, but really isn’t. And the other is the “false negative”. In that error mode, a rejected hypothesis is, in fact, true. The same thought process applies to idea generation. In the chart below, you can see this graphically. Every idea is either good or bad, but it is also perceived as good or bad. Arranging the two parameters into a grid gives four quadrants.